Nathaniel Hawthorne came home heartbroken. He’d just been fired from his job in the custom house. His wife, rather than responding with anxiety, surprised him with joy. “Now you can write your book!”

He wasn’t so positive. “And what shall we live on while I’m writing it?”

To his amazement she opened a drawer and revealed a wad of money she’d saved out of her housekeeping budget. “I always knew you were a man of genius,” she told him. “I always knew you’d write a masterpiece.”

She believed in her husband. And because she did, he wrote. And because he wrote, every library in America has a copy of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

You have the power to change someone’s life simply by the words that you speak. “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.”

The group responsible for propagating the malicious program commonly known as the Storm Worm changed tactics this week, using e-mail messages masquerading as verification announcements from online Web sites and clubs to lure victims.

The e-mail messages use a fairly regular format, including a brief greeting, a supposed temporary login name and password, and a link to a malicious Web site, according to antivirus firms. The destination site will tell the user that, to log on, they need to download a secure login applet. Victims that do install the software will become infected with the Storm Worm bot software.

The names of the online Web sites used in the e-mail messages appear to be constructed from two randomly chosen words and include names “Fun World,” “Internet Dating,” and “MP3 World.” In addition, there is some evidence that the Storm Worm is using the MPack infection tool kit to compromise systems.

The Storm Worm, also known as Zhelatin and Nuwar, first started spreading in January using fairly large, but controlled, bursts of e-mail routed through previously compromised computers. Each burst typically sent out a custom variant, trying to infect systems before the user updated their antivirus definitions. The original program compromised systems by luring users into opening the attachments of messages with subject lines regarding news events, including violent storms in Europe–a characteristic that led to the program’s naming.

Earlier this month, the Research and Education Networking Information Sharing and Analysis Center (REN-ISAC) sent out a warning to universities after a number of denial-of-service attacks appeared to be aimed in retribution at schools which had scanned systems for Storm Worm infections.

Okay – I’ve debated doing this for a while. Every once in a while I’ll be reading email and something jumps out of one and it’s just a GREAT quote. Either it’s really funny or weird or deep…whatever – it can be taken out of the email to stand on it’s own for a reason.